VIVISECTION I

Tomorrow is the last day
of electroshock, they are selling

all the batteries
and lamps are dimming
as I speak.

They have sold the bells.
So there is no sound.
The guards have retired.
All the expensive machines
broke down long ago, so
there is no pillaging,
no ransack, no rape.

Tomorrow is the last day
of my arcadia, they are selling

a dream of a new nite-spot.

They are marketing memorabilia.
Paintings of the surgery, on porcelain
plates.

I am commissioned to design
the plates in memoriam.

I eat my dinner off the prototypes.
I see the pharmacy under spaghetti
I feel my arcadian gland pulse
in my eyes, I feel the spaghetti
turn to shit inside my guts.

The sound of bells
turns to sighs inside my lungs.

 

VIVISECTION II

The new pharmacy is under
the dam. Is under inspection.
Is under siege. Is delayed in
construction. Is under duress.
Is under repetition. Is
underperforming. Is under se-
ige. Is understood. Is under
new management, yr majesty.
Is undercut. Is under appreci-
ated. Is undeniably an impr-
ovement. Is mis-understandable.
Is mis-manageable. Is under sea.

The World’s Tallest Aquarium
will house offices, restaurants,
and three cinemas.

When I am done.
Perhaps I will be mummified

in a glass coffin.

To prove to the countless undoubtable
in denial: Not a fish; cold unfeeling.
Not foul flesh; wild unforgiving.

I am just a simple human thing.
Nothing less.

 

VIVISECTION III

I am all mass today.
Solid as the bricks
of the pharmacy.

Fluid as the Aquarium
economy. Buy. Bell. Seal.
Sell.

I am real
and hard

as a musket
ball or ball-pin
hammer or the
rounded tip

of a fat digit
sticking, probing
my pisshole
my bullet-dock.

Iron harbor closing
around my fist. The office
where I draft factories

is like a bear trap
in that they both
resemble jaws
without a voice.

 

VIVISECTION IV

Tomorrow is the first day
of chemotherapy.

I forgot my book
and there is nothing

but me

and my pens and their
excretions.

Time passes
and I feel the clock
atrophy.

The shark from the aquarium
is at the door, he is sick

I hold his nose as it
drains from blue to grey

as the swamp brine is
replaced with sweet
salt water.

The sharkbody rejects
the chemotherapy

with his dying breath
the shark tells me there
are fissures forming

in the World’s Tallest Aquarium.
I’m going to have to tell
my pharmacy about this.

 

VIVISECTION V

The pharmacist
and the architect
have asked me
to stay here in the
World’s Tallest Aquarium
for observation.

There is a magnifying
apparatus attached
to the tank, and I appear
monstrous, enormous,
critical.

To me,
the pharmacist and
architect appear
microbial.
There is plankton
in the fluid.

My atmosphere is
nutrient rich.

But my shark is dry,
the pharmacy is draining
and the sea rejects the salt.